I should detest, and I have no love for the nuisance of house and furniture, adding up bills, settling accounts, hiring servants, and getting up the price of butcher’s meat. I have the unpopularity, the fame, of being a party man, [with] the care of Tracts and the engagements of agitation. I am more useful as I am; but Keble is a light too spiritual and subtle to be seen unless put upon a candlestick.’ There is a most affectionate ending to his letter sent to the post on Candlemas Day. ‘Θάρσει, φίλον ἦτορ. You could not but get weaker this weather, so confined.’
Meanwhile Hurrell had written ‘the last letter he wrote to me, perhaps the last letter he wrote at all.’ It is dated Jan. 27, 1836; the flow of it, the wonted pace, is gallant as usual, though it held both serious criticism and sad news. ‘You may perhaps have seen in the papers,’ he says to Newman, that my grandmother died, the 14th of this month. She retained her faculties to the last, and seems to have undergone the minimum of suffering which death requires. She was within a month or two of eighty-nine.’ This was his father’s mother, Phillis Hurrell.
‘It is very encouraging about the Oxford Tracts, but I wish I could prevail on you, when the second edition comes out, to cancel or materially alter several. The other day accidentally put in my way the Tract on “The Apostolical Succession in the English Church”; and it really does seem so very unfair, that I wonder you could, even in the extremity of οἰκονομία and φενακισμὸς have consented to be a party to it.[261] The Patriarchate of Constantinople, as everyone knows, was not one “from the first,” but neighbouring Churches voluntarily submitted to it, in the first instance, and then by virtue of their oaths remained its ecclesiastical subjects; and the same argument by which you justify England and Ireland would justify all those Churches in setting up any day for themselves. The obvious meaning of the canon [of Ephesus] is that Patriarchs might not begin to exercise authority in Churches hitherto independent, without their consent.
‘Christie tells me you have had a letter from poor Blanco White, pleased rather than otherwise with [my] review,[262] and mistaking it for yours, and sending you a copy of the book. Poor fellow: I should much like to know in what tone he wrote; it must have been a painful thing answering him…. I don’t gain flesh, in spite of all the milk. Indeed, I suspect that in the last six weeks I have lost a good deal, but the symptoms remain the same.’ It is in this letter that Froude arranges for the continued dedication of the accumulated dues from his own Fellowship to the propagation of the Cause dear to his heart. ‘So spend away, my boy,’ he calls cheerfully to Newman, ‘and make a great fuss, as if your money flowed in from a variety of sources!’ It was his valediction.
Archdeacon Froude, early in February, leaves a blank on the last page of his communication to Newman, ‘for your regular correspondent to fill.’ Then comes the ominous postscript: ‘Hurrell wishes me to say that he has nothing particular to say just now, but that you shall hear from him in three or four days. He has received your two letters. And now (as he will not ask to see what I may write), I will tell you in a few words that my fears for him have increased considerably within the last week. There can be now no doubt that he has been losing ground, that he is much thinner than when Mr. Rogers left us, and as evidently weaker…. He is generally cheerful, sleeps well, and takes a sufficient quantity of food.’
Newman’s thirty-fifth birthday came on February 21, and upon that day, absorbed as he now became in fighting Hampdenism, he penned a loving letter of ‘long, long thoughts’ to his favourite sister Jemima, betrothed to John Mozley. ‘Thank my Mother and Harriet for their congratulations upon this day. They will be deserved, if God gives me grace to fulfil the purposes for which He has led me on hitherto in a wonderful way. I think I am conscious to myself that, whatever are my faults, I wish to live and die to His glory; to surrender wholly to Him as His instrument, to whatever work, and at whatever personal sacrifice, (though I cannot duly
realise my own words when I say so). He is teaching me, it would seem, to depend on Him only; for, as perhaps Rogers told you, I am soon to lose dear Froude: which, looking forward to the next twenty-five years of my life, and its probable occupations, is the greatest loss I could have. I shall be truly widowed; yet I hope to bear it lightly.’
At intervals of five days, Archdeacon Froude gave Newman his melancholy bulletin. Nowhere is he more admirable than in facing the impending loss of the son who had come to be his pride and glory, and his bosom friend. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley: ‘There was a sort of stoicism about Archdeacon Froude’s character which sometimes surprised those who had only seen him for a day or two, conversing, or sketching, or sight-seeing. He once rather shocked his clergy by delivering a Charge while a very dear daughter was lying dead in his house: but there was a romantic conception of duty in the act which affords some key to Richard Hurrell’s character.’
Feb. 18, 1836.
‘My dear Hurrell desires me to account to you for his long silence, but … I am sure you must have attributed it to the real cause, and be prepared for a confirmation of the fears I then expressed…. All hope of his recovery is gone; but we have the comfort of seeing him quite free from pain, and in sure trust that the change will be a happy one whenever it shall please God to take him. His thoughts continually turn to Oxford, to yourself, and Mr. Keble; but my heart is too full to add more than his instructions to thank you for all you have written to him, and to say how much he was interested in Mr. Rogers’ most amusing account of the late proceedings in the University.’